A thermoelectric module uses various methods of showing an interaction of heat with electricity and has a structure of using a Seebeck effect of generating an electromotive force by a temperature difference, a structure of using a Peltier effect of absorbing (or generating) heat by a current, or the like.
The thermoelectric module may include an N-type thermoelectric element and a P-type thermoelectric element which are paired, an upper electrode and a lower electrode each connected to an upper portion and a lower portion of the N-type thermoelectric element and the P-type thermoelectric element, an upper substrate and a lower substrate on which the upper electrode and the lower electrode are each supported, or the like.
Technologies to align and arrange the thermoelectric elements with respect to each electrode, a substrate, or the like during the manufacturing of the thermoelectric module may be required. For this purpose, the related art has used a robot arm, an alignment mechanism, or the like.
As the scheme of using the robot arm aligns individual thermoelectric element one by one, there is a disadvantage in that it takes a large amount of time to align the thermoelectric elements.
As the scheme of using an alignment mechanism requires a separate additional process to configure a final position of the thermoelectric element, there is a disadvantage in that the operation of fitting the final position of the thermoelectric element may require a large degree of work or effort.
Meanwhile, the existing thermoelectric element may have a circular shape or a rectangular parallelepiped shape and therefore has the problem in that the alignment of the thermoelectric elements may be difficult or a large amount of work or effort.
Therefore, a thermoelectric element having a spherical shape has been used to implement the precise and rapid alignment, but the thermoelectric element having the spherical shape may be easily separated from the fixed position even by fine vibrations during the alignment, and therefore a defect rate of the process may be increased.
In particular, since the thermoelectric element having the spherical shape is hard to control a distance between a hot side and a cold side due to structural characteristics of having the same diameter, the thermoelectric element has the disadvantage in that it is difficult to sufficiently secure the temperature difference between the hot side and the cold side and the efficiency of the thermoelectric module may be reduced.